Mechanization is as important for the nurserymen as it is for any other field of agriculture. This is because there is a tremendous amount of labor involved in the operation of a nursery, and the nurseryman has to contend with the problems of scarcity of labor and overall labor costs just as any other business.
One particular labor intensive area is that of transferring relatively young and small plants from their initial rooting container to a larger plant container for further growth and development. A great deal of nurseries and plant producing facilities generally perform this operation by hand. Consequently, such plant transfer systems are time consuming and very inefficient. As a practical matter, the use of manual labor to transfer such plants severely limits the capacity of a nursery for handling such transfer operations.
Therefore, there is and continues to be, a need for a fully automatic plant transfer system that will automatically transfer plants from an initial growing tray or container to a a transfer area or second container for further growth and development.